No Escape?: Goethe’s Strategies of Self-Projection and Their Role in German Literary Historiography

Abstract

ACCORDING TO HAROLD BLOOM, every Goethe text, however divergent from the others, bears the mark of his unique and overwhelming personality, cannot be evaded or deconstructed. 1 While Bloom is concerned the force of Goethe's personality as it manifests itself in his works, the impact of his personality on German literary historiography is no less remarkable. To take but one example of his enduring iconic status, the successful Deutsche Literaturgeschichte by Wolfgang Beutin et al. - in its seventh expanded edition - conveys the essence of its subject matter by depicting the head of Goethe as the sole image on the front cover.2 Unscathed by the Death of the Author, Goethe the man continues to be at the centre of German literary history. On the back cover we find some also-rans: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Bertolt Brecht, and Christa Wolf. While these authors contribute to the project of German literary history as exemplary participants who are subject to the changing forces of literary taste and perhaps political correctness (Wolf has displaced Wolfgang Borchert3), Goethe endures as the embodiment of all that is most valuable in over a millennium of writing in the German language. In the following, it be assumed that Goethe's role in German literary history is not just the result of his literary and their reception by later scholars, but also the consequence of his strategies of self-projection. It is well recognized that Goethe a master in the art of projecting his poetic genius and that Germanistik highly receptive to his own accounts of the emergence of his works, to the point of tending to construct a normative aesthetics for German literature on that basis.4 The purpose here is not to rehearse these insights, but to examine the strategic significance of the metaphors Goethe selected in projecting his poetic persona, and to consider their legacy and implications for German literary historiography. Cognitive linguistics has demonstrated the mental and emotional force of linguistic metaphor, showing the systematic connection between conventional metaphors and the conceptualization of the objects and processes they refer to.5 Goethe's choice of metaphors in explanations of his personal creativity and his role in the development of German literature can shed light on the mechanisms by he constructed German historiography in his image, and used conventional metaphors of the time to project originality, and independence from convention. Discussion must be selective and highlight the metaphors by Goethe shaped his roles as origin, goal, and liberator of German literature. The power of these metaphors continues to be evident in recent accounts of literary history, raising the question whether they can be evaded in favour of different metaphors that might yield alternative histories. Goethe's consummate skill as a poet made him a master of metaphor, that most poetic of techniques for stimulating the reader's imagination. This mastery is already evident in the whole range of genres in which he published influential works during the early 1770s, in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, in Gotz von Berlichingen, and in his lyric poetry. It is no less evident in his comments about his own processes of creativity, as emerges for example in a letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi written in 1774. Goethe uses resonant metaphors to project his creative talents: Sieh lieber, was doch alles Schreibens anfang und Ende ist die Reproducktion der Welt um mich, durch die innre Welt die alles packt, verbindet, neuschafft, knetet und in eigner Form, Manier, wieder hinstellt, das bleibt ewig Geheimniss Gott sey Danck, das ich auch nicht offenbaaren will den Gaffern u. Schwazzern.6 Goethe can here be seen to develop his creative potential by taking heed of arguments such as Young's injunctions to the poet: dive deep into thy bosom and Reverence thyself'1 His explanation of the creative process by means of the metaphor of reproduction indicates that he is moving in the orbit of the debate about imitation that had gained prominence in the seventeenth century with the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. …